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Mobile applications have become an important sales and marketing channel for B2B (business to business) organizations. Digitally savvy millennials now make up the largest B2B buying audience, driving the shift to digital channels, which are estimated to make up 53% of B2B revenue within two years.
As a result, B2B companies are investing in headless commerce and mobile apps to meet the demands for personalized buying experiences and provide critical touch points to support the entire buyer journey.
Key Takeaways:
- Mobile apps can help meet the demands of today’s B2B buyers, with ROI across critical KPIs including conversion, retention and lifetime value
- The needs of your buyers require investment in critical mobile capabilities (we’ll list which ones)
- B2B mobile apps are different from B2C eCommerce apps
- There are common challenges B2B companies face when developing mobile apps
- How to get started on your mobile app
What Are the Benefits of B2B eCommerce Mobile Apps?
The average person engages with over 30 mobile applications on smartphones per month in their daily lives, bringing these B2C (business to consumer) experiences to B2B eCommerce. B2B buyers increasingly rely on mobile devices for research (65%) and eCommerce (89%), so B2B sellers with underdeveloped digital capabilities may struggle to compete. In fact, there has been a 30% increase in preference by B2B buyers for purchasing via mobile app.
While investing in a mobile-friendly eCommerce website remains critical, a mobile app offers distinct benefits in performance and capabilities, including a more interactive user interface (buttons vs menus) and offline capabilities. Some of the business benefits of a mobile app include:
Deliver a superior buyer experience
Mobile applications can help meet buyers where they are, using a variety of devices to inform purchase decisions and to make or repeat purchasing. In fact, of the 70% of B2B buyers who prefer doing business remotely, 97% would make a digital, self-serve purchase exceeding $50,000. Making those experiences easier, faster and more pleasurable can set your B2B business apart.
A mobile app can leverage more of the features of mobile devices, including integrations with cameras (e.g. for AR/VR, search by image), calendar, and push notifications. Further, a mobile app is faster and easier to use than a website, helping buyers find what they are looking for, streamline the order experience, provide self-service capabilities, and more easily connect with a sales rep and service resources.
Omnichannel experience
In line with the latest B2B eCommerce trends, the ideal mobile app will be connected to your headless B2B eCommerce architecture to ensure a seamless, omnichannel experience that moves with the buyer across devices and channels and across the different stages of the buying journey. Tracking buyers across channels can provide you with invaluable business intelligence about your buyers to help refine messaging and inform sales interactions.
A well-designed mobile app can deliver a superior experience, including personalization, always-available information and streamlined search tools, faster purchasing, and a faster connection with people in your organization.
“A company-wide commitment to omnichannel excellence can be a real game changer for B2B companies. Early movers will not only be in a better position to fend off competition, but they can also capture cost savings, increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and grow their businesses.”
– Harvard Business Review, How B2B Businesses Can Get Omnichannel Sales Right
Direct interaction and communication to build loyalty
While research and sales are increasingly mobile, this doesn’t eliminate humans from the buyer journey, it changes their role from a cold pitch to one that provides assistance during information gathering, provides comparisons, offers personalized advice, and is aligned with relationship building.
B2B buyers expect real-time interaction (80%), regardless of the channel or time of day, with those that respond the fastest are more likely to win the sale (60%). A mobile app can include tools that facilitate communication including:
- Live chat with sales or customer support (text, video)
- AI-assisted chatbots
- Integrated support within the self-service portal
- Gather customer data to inform customer service and sales interactions
- Offer personalized offers to connect with sales, based off browsing behavior
Bridging the gap between digital and physical stores
For B2B sellers that have physical sales locations, your mobile strategy must include ways to keep inventory levels in sync and potentially offer in-store pick up for online purchases. Furthermore, the app should ideally display in-store purchase history to streamline order management and future purchases.
Access to valuable insights and analytics
The way buyers interact with apps is not the same as how buyers interact with websites, providing you new data points about your buyers, their browsing and buying behavior, and how you can better meet their expectations.
Support post-sale experiences
Quality of customer service (CS) is critical to retain and grow the lifetime value of B2B buyers, influencing 82% of business buyer purchase decisions. A mobile app that has a well-designed self-service portal can include live chat or messaging with CS and sales teams. Further, your mobile app can provide access to training materials, videos and other on-demand resources from your knowledge center.
Improved KPIs, Scalability & Growth
Today, 90% of B2B buyers are willing to switch to a competitor if they are offered a better online experience, so setting yourself apart can have strong returns.
While there are many benefits with B2B eCommerce in general, a mobile app can help deliver on key performance indicators (KPIs) including conversion, retention / churn and customer lifetime value. As B2B buyers evolve, a mobile app will help ensure your B2B business remains competitive and offer greater scalability and growth potential.
Improved marketplace capabilities
60% of B2B buyers are open to making purchases on marketplaces, driving business growth for B2B2C businesses (business to business to consumer). Mobile apps can be used to take marketplaces to the next level, including having push notifications (restock, bidding sites, time-sensitive deals), scan QR codes in-person for online order, and simplify search across large and complex catalogs.
What Are the Must-Have Features for Your B2B eCommerce Mobile App?
If you are considering building a B2B eCommerce app for mobile, you should consider the following key features and functionality to support B2B sales (some of which overlap with B2B eCommerce website development recommendations):
Clean UI and Seamless UX
B2B eCommerce UX (user experience) design leverages best practices to ensure the mobile app is optimized for accessibility, efficiency and discoverability, so that buyers can find what they’re looking for easily and quickly. This will include ensuring the app includes a clean, easy to navigate design that includes intuitive navigation menus and buttons, advanced search capabilities, high quality product pages (good images, clear text, expandable menus of information), logical content structure, and a streamlined checkout process.
Furthermore, the app should consider accessibility needs that make the app user-friendly for all users, including respecting native font sizes, color choices, and providing voice options to read or interact with the app.
Personalization
To compete today, personalization is critical, showing that you know and appreciate your customer and providing them opportunities to work with you in a more streamlined way. Leveraging artificial intelligence, personalization can apply to search results, pricing, discounting, catalog displays, and product recommendations.
Self-service features
With many B2B eCommerce organizations, mobile apps are created not just for the initial sale, but more so for the continued sale, helping support the relationship with existing customers to increase sales over time. In this way, it is critical to enable a self-service portal within your mobile app, helping users access their (role-based) capabilities, which could include looking at order history, shopping lists, bulk or re-order options, communication capabilities (within an organization and with your business) and access training and support materials.
It is critical that your self-service portal in your app have all the same capabilities as your website to reduce friction in the experience, so your eCommerce architecture and B2B eCommerce platform play into how well you’re able to execute on this.
Mobile push notifications
Where appropriate, push notifications can be enabled to remind buyers of restocks, upcoming sales, abandoned shopping carts, or overdue invoices.
Integrated social proof
The best B2B eCommerce websites and apps know that social proof is critical to closing on sales. Throughout the app, sprinkle in quotes from clients (snippets), product ratings and reviews, analyst ratings, and case studies to highlight the strength of your organization and/or products / services.
Fast checkout
83% of B2B buyers consider a smooth payment and checkout experience a top priority, impacting their future loyalty. While B2B businesses still need to support traditional capabilities for RFP / Quote, invoice, payment on account, check, and bank transfers, simplifying every checkout experience is critical. A mobile app is optimized for rapid checkouts,
- Easily navigate self-serve, to view, approve or pay invoices
- Support one-click checkout for credit card purchases (credit card on file)
- Easy navigation to past orders, shopping lists
AI enhancements
One in five new B2B products will include Generative AI (genAI), with AI capabilities being integrated across mobile commerce to support the user experience and enhance back-end productivity. Areas such as product discovery (search) and personalization hold the greatest current potential.
Live chat, in-app communication
Mobile apps play a critical role in supporting customer service, but also in sales. Currently, live chat is the top rated channel for researching B2B suppliers, with mobile apps offering a streamlined method to initiate and save chat interactions.
How Does a B2B eCommerce Mobile App Differ from a B2C eCommerce Mobile App?
We all interact with B2C apps every day, so we may assume that B2B apps are very similar. However, B2B buyers have different needs pre-sale and post-sale, driving apps to deliver very different capabilities.
Just like there are differences between B2B and B2C websites, there are differences between apps:
| B2C eCommerce Apps | B2B eCommerce Apps | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of users | Large | Narrow |
| App promotion | App store, media campaigns | App store or corporate website, trade shows, email marketing, word of mouth |
| Customer journey | Streamline purchase | Support research / problem solving, streamline complex purchasing, support loyalty |
| Self-service | Order management, order tracking, wish lists | Account management (multiple, role-based buyers), approvals, shopping card, knowledge base, order management, fulfillment tracking, shopping lists |
| App updates | Frequent updates to stay on trend (design, technology) and keep customers engaged | Stable for a longer period of time |
| Personalization | Search, product recommendations | Search, product recommendations, pricing, catalogs |
What are B2B Mobile Development Approaches?
Before you can start seeing the benefits of a B2B mobile app, it’s critical to understand that there are many approaches to mobile app development (e.g. native vs hybrid vs cross-platform), each with different pros and cons.
- Native App An app created specifically for one operating system (OS), e.g. iOS or Android. Native apps have the highest performance, security and user experience, taking advantage of inherent device capabilities, but this approach may require multiple native apps to serve each OS, increasing development and maintenance costs.
- Cross-Platform App A cross-platform app creates a single code base, reusing that code across multiple platforms, calling in to the native SDK at runtime to render the UI, making it faster to launch an app that can be used by more buyers. Cross-platform app performance is dependent on the framework, but does not quite reach that of a native app.
- Progressive Web App (PWA) A progressive web app is an app built using web technologies, essentially delivering a website that behaves like a mobile app. Like a mobile app, PWAs can be “installed” and launched with common app icons or used directly from a browser. PWAs don’t offer quite the same level of security, but consume less data, take up less space, can operate across platforms, and are the fastest apps to develop.
- Hybrid App A hybrid app combines elements of native and PWA, wrapping a core code base into a native app with the help of plugins (creating a native viewer) to be able to access native capabilities, offering performance and capabilities that more closely resemble native apps, but without the same development cost.
Learn more about the pros and cons of different mobile app architecture approaches and some of the top mobile app development trends in 2024.
What Are the Common Challenges in Developing a B2B eCommerce Mobile App?
Despite the obvious benefits of rolling out a B2B eCommerce app for your eCommerce business, there are common challenges you may encounter:
- Wrong technology
Choosing the wrong mobile app strategy and technology (see above), missing on user experience goals, performance, or competitive position.
- Wrong partner
Using an ‘app builder’ or ‘no code app builder’ service that ‘translates’ your website into an app, but often without the performance or capability gains a custom app would deliver. If you lack internal resources for app development, it is best to consider an experienced outsourced partner.
- Inadequate security and maintenance plan
Privacy and security are critical within B2B, particularly as some organizations now face increased regulatory requirements to secure their supply chain and software supply chain. Building an app that is secure requires features such as multi-factor authentication or passkey support, role-based access controls, SSO integration, and more. Security should be a strong part of ongoing app maintenance plans.
- Lack of features
A mobile app should offer a better experience than your website, so knowing what features to integrate requires understanding of UX design and the capabilities of your eCommerce software.
- Performance issues
There are many factors that can influence performance of a mobile app, including choice of hosting, lack of CDN, choice in mobile strategy, language and/or framework, inefficient code and/or coding errors, unreliable third-party services, feature bloat, unoptimized media, improper cache management, overloaded theme, redirect inefficiencies, and more.
The good news is, many of these challenges can be avoided or retroactively supported with the help of an experienced eCommerce mobile development partner.
Looking for New Ways to Grow in B2B?
If you are looking to start, grow or fix your B2B mobile eCommerce app, look for a trusted partner who has a strong history working with global B2B eCommerce brands. Net Solutions has more than two decades of experience in digital development, working with brands to build strategies and design B2B user journeys for eCommerce stores and mobile apps that are engaging and successful.
